Money in the Making
Houston rappers couldn’t beat the system, so they created their own. Now the H-town rap scene is the hottest in the country.
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Lil’ Keke’s way with words eventually reached 27-year-old Robert Davis, better known as DJ Screw. Screw’s home studio in South Park functions as a kind of finishing school for rappers. He is by no means the only deejay in Houston who has recording facilities in his home. Equipment has become so affordable that almost anyone with the ambition can pull together the tape recorders, samplers, computers, and other gear necessary to put together a rap song or album. But Screw is one of the most original mixers in Houston, notorious for taking existing hip-hop tracks and “screwing up” the music, slowing the beats to a tempo as deliberate as a Southern drawl, while mixing out the vocal tracks so that he and his stable of twenty or so rappers can do their rhymes, all in slo-mo. The sonic effect is mesmerizing and inextricably linked with the act of getting high, something Screw acknowledges in the liner notes of both 3 ’N the Morning, Part One and Part Two, recommending “sippin’ syrup, gin, etc., [smokin’] chronic indo, cess, bud” to get in the proper frame of mind. The screwed-up sound and DJ Screw’s direct sales method—making generically labeled cassettes of his work and selling them out of his house at first and then at his Screwed Up Records and Tapes store on Cullen—have earned him the reputation as Houston’s king of the underground.
Rap is cheap: All you need are words, beats, and a microphone. “For fifteen dollars,” says Lil’ Keke, “you could go to his house, he’d say your name on tape and let you freestyle.” Screw liked what he heard and invited Lil’ Keke to join his Screwed Up Click. On Screw’s second commercial release, 3 ’N the Morning, Part Two, Lil’ Keke’s boastful, brash rap “Pimpin tha Pen” earned him a reputation around town. That led to a “feature,” or guest rap, on an album that Screw’s alleged brother, Al-D, was doing for Jam Down Entertainment, a small Houston label started in 1996 by Patrick Lewis. Two days later, Lewis offered Lil’ Keke a recording contract.
A native of Trinidad, the 35-year-old Lewis grew up in Baytown, where he worked as a nightclub disc jockey and gradually gained enough experience to start his own record company. The first thing he did was build his own studio, like Screw had done. “I realized most of the money went into the studio. I figured if I cut off the middleman, I could have more money to invest in promotions and other things. Most people think building a studio is very expensive, but it’s not. It’s a cheap way of becoming rich.”
Though Lewis had limited funding, he had a sound strategy for Lil’ Keke’s album, called Don’t Mess Wit Texas. Lil’ Keke had been performing its hot track “South Side,” a call-and-response celebration of the rise of Southern rap, in shows long before the album came out. “When the retailers started calling, saying, ‘Man, just give me a date when it’s coming out,’ I knew I had a bomb,” says Lewis. The payoff was immediate. Using the Houston subdistributor Southwest Wholesale Records and Tapes (one of the largest rap wholesalers in the United States), Lewis moved 20,000 units to stores in the first week of the album’s July 1997 release.
Lil’ Keke’s album followed the simple financial blueprint already drawn by other Down South releases: small investment, large yield. With a payback of more than $100,000 on an initial outlay of probably less than $10,000, Lewis made a bundle, easily compensating for losses he’d incurred on releases by Al-D and Most Hated. And unlike most rap product, which quickly fades from the charts and whose audience is exceptionally fickle, Don’t Mess Wit Texas developed legs. By December, more than 80,000 units had been sold in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Lewis started booking Lil’ Keke himself on the Texas-Louisiana club circuit, cutting out the promoters and other middlemen. And he put much of his money back into promotions, buying radio ads and putting up posters. “We have to work retail, the clubs, the neighborhoods, everywhere,” says Lewis. To widen his artists’ base, he did what several Houston rap labels have done and got major-label distribution, signing Jam Down Entertainment to a deal with Breakaway Entertainment, a Los Angeles—based label aligned with industry behemoth Polygram.
The technology is inexpensive, his label is small and hands-on, but most important, Lil’ Keke, like most H-town rappers, is hungry. And he is convinced he has found a gig for life. “I know this: I’m gonna die in music. I’m not going to rap forever, but I’ll be producing, executive producing, forever. You gotta know what’s for you. If you ain’t willing to put one hundred and ten in it, if you don’t really believe in it, it ain’t what you wanna do. Because there’s too many more ways to lose than there are to win.”
“The Ghetto’s Tryin’ to Kill Me”
RAP IS ABOUT TELLING STORIES, and most H-town rappers have rough tales to tell. Some of the hardest are told by Master P. The artist formerly known as Percy Miller is a handsome, charismatic self-made product of the Calliope housing projects in New Orleans’ Third Ward and a walk-on member of the University of Houston basketball team in 1985 who appears to be able to do anything he sets his mind to. His company, No Limit Records, of which he is the star performer and CEO, claims that he and the other artists on the label have sold $180 million worth of albums in five years.
Master P’s artistry is rooted in his background. His call-and-response style (including his trademark “Unnnhs!” and phrases such as “I got the hookup. Holler if you hear me”) comes from his Southern heritage, specifically the musical ways of black New Orleans. His raps (“The Ghetto’s Tryin’ to Kill Me,” “99 Ways to Die”) reflect his rough upbringing. He frequently rhymes about dealing drugs; his brother Kevin was killed by a drug addict. “I had to survive and do what it took to survive,” he says. “If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here right now. Only a fool could not understand that. That ain’t where I wanted to be at. I didn’t have the things that most fortunate kids have, like a nice house, a lot of money, both of their parents. I struggled all my life and I know how it is, and that’s why I’m here to do the right thing. I done changed my life.”
He is changing his life again, recently announcing his retirement as a solo rap artist with the release of MP Da Last Don, which for two weeks this summer was the best-selling album in the nation. There’s too much business to take care of. P is the kingpin of an entertainment empire based in Baton Rouge that includes such far-flung enterprises as movies (P has written, directed, and starred in three films in the past year, two of them direct-to-video releases), a sports management agency, a No Limit clothing line, real estate investments (including a home in Sugar Land), and a $7.8 million studio complex under construction that will have a full-scale, gold-plated Sherman tank parked out front (the label’s logo features a gold tank).
Another successful rapper with a tough past is Premro Smith, a.k.a. Eightball, whose raps have helped turn Tony Draper’s Suave House into one of Houston’s biggest rap labels. Eightball has staked his reputation on being able to rap hard and make it real, essential badges of credibility for any gangsta rapper. He rhymes about armed robbery from the first-person perspective and spews phrases such as “do the crime, waste no time, then I’m going to get mine” and “hip-hop Glock poppin’ hollow point heat.”
“To some people, a lot of stuff I rap about might sound farfetched, but that shit be happening: ten people in one row house,” observes the portly 25-year-old Eightball (“It’s just one of the names that fit me. I’m not a helluva pool player”), who grew up in Memphis’ rough Orange Mound ghetto. “The life that I was living and the things that I saw were raw,” he says. “Me being from that life, I can’t escape that. I’m not trying to glorify the ghetto or say the projects are a beautiful place to live, because they’re not. But projects and ghettos have made some of the greatest people in the world. Now I have to bring it in a different light.”
Eightball and his partner, MJG, were brought to Houston by music-promoter-turned-label-head Draper, who essentially repeated what Houston’s Don Robey had done in the fifties when he went to Memphis and found Bobby Blue Bland and Little Junior Parker, the cornerstones of his Peacock and Duke labels. Today Draper is $5 million richer from a distribution deal he cut with Universal Music, and Eightball is a platinum-selling artist (his latest album, the triple-CD Lost, entered the Billboard album chart in June at number five) who owns a home in an affluent neighborhood in southwest Houston.
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